Book Review: The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Volume 8, No. 4 (Winter 2005)

When studying the origins of the Austrian School, one is often struck by the influence played by Catholic thinkers and culture during the centuries leading up to the publication of Menger’s Principles. As a result, the free market theorist is often puzzled by the many important Catholic thinkers who, since the last decade of the nineteenth century, diverge on economic issues from this tradition in favor of the theories of the New Economics (to use the preferred term of journalist Henry Hazlitt for Keynesian theory) and other economic ideas the origin of which can often be traced to Calvinist-influenced British classicism. Indeed, classical and neoclassical economics themselves result from a secular schism in the development of economic thought that began with Adam Smith and lead to Mill, Marx, Marshall, and Keynes.